Paris Climate Conference DOA As Capital Proves More Important than Life

Multi-national capitalists have banned together to protect their obscene wealth and to doom the planet at the same time.  This comes even before the vaunted Paris Conference gets underway.

Given the choice of a dead world or the neutralization of a few hundred oligarchs, we must wonder now which options humanity will choose.  I know--it's a tough choice.

From the NYTimes:

They [negotiators] have pointedly declined to take up a recommendation from scientists, made several years ago, that they set a cap on total greenhouse gases as a way to achieve that goal, and then figure out how to allocate the emissions fairly. The pledges countries are making are voluntary, and were established in most nations as a compromise between the desire to be ambitious and the perceived cost and political difficulty of emissions cutbacks.

In effect, the countries are vowing to make changes that collectively still fall far short of the necessary goal, much like a patient who, upon hearing from his doctor that he must lose 50 pounds to avoid life-threatening health risks, takes pride in cutting out fries but not cake and ice cream.

The scientists argue that there is only so much carbon — in the form of exhaust from coal-burning power plants, automobile tailpipes, forest fires and the like — that the atmosphere can absorb before the planet suffers profound damage, with swaths of it potentially becoming uninhabitable.